


inch forward and let each other in

by Analinea



Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [16]
Category: Charlie's Angels (2019)
Genre: Day 21, Day 27, EHLP, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, I Don't feel so well, Infection, Sabina whump, Whumptober 2020, as i'm tagging i'm realizing i don't have a title yet, i finished this at 10:30pm but i finished this, i'm still on schedule guys i'm ready to start crying, ok who had natural disasters on their 2020 bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27234289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analinea/pseuds/Analinea
Summary: There are the menaces everyone expects. From other people to nature itself, the world can be a dangerous place; this is why fairy tales exist. So children learn to be afraid.
Relationships: Elena Houghlin/Jane Kano/Sabina Wilson
Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947337
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	inch forward and let each other in

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the Gmorning, Gnight! book by Lin-Manuel Miranda, thank you to my bookmark at page 149 for the help.
> 
> Sorry in advance for any typo, it's very late and I'll regret them tomorrow probably T.T also press F for me please, tomorrow I'll only have after 9pm to write *nervous thumbs up*
> 
> Also, sorry² because this is the last Charlie's Angels fic for whumptober. It was awesome and to the people who commented on every of my fics for this fandom, yes, you, I love you so much you got me through this month of writing almost non stop, I'm so grateful <3
> 
> Enjoy :)

There are the menaces everyone expects. From other people to nature itself, the world can be a dangerous place; this is why fairy tales exist. So children learn to be afraid.

Of course, not all of them listen: those with the wild in their veins run into dark forests as if they’ve always belonged there. Put their hands into the fire because they burn hotter than any flame.

Others have taken the stories to heart, so they clench their fists and defy the obscurity with the certainty to win the fight. They know themselves to be stronger than any lurking creature wanting to harm them, and are ready to protect anyone in need to be protected.

Some, the most innocuous looking by virtue of being the patient ones, teach themselves how to push the shadows away by building the strongest lights. 

And when those children meet, it’s the monsters’ turn to be terrified. 

Which brings us to three Angels, walking across a rocky plateau, a day away from the city they’re heading to. Here, the simplest modern technology has trouble reaching anyone ready to listen, and the most sophisticated...well.

There are menaces that everyone expects, but even the three women here have trouble not believing in bad luck, when the sun is the one turning against you. 

“Solar flare.” Elena shades her eyes with a hand as she turns them to the sky; solar flares are not visible to the naked eye, but it’s human nature to look anyway. “Fried up all the electronics for miles around, I bet.”

Sabina mirrors her, thinking that there’s nothing to fry for those miles anyway. “We could always try for smoke signals,” she breathlessly chuckles. Elena looks back at her, eyes still full of the sun, mouth concerned. 

“Are you alright?” 

Sabina has been out of breath for a good while now. But only this morning they escaped from the explosion of the secret evil lair they spent three days looking for in the mountains. She’s allowed a little fatigue. 

And that isn’t counting on the disappointment of finishing a mission with no way to call for a pick up. No one knows their exact position, and they were given five days to complete their objectives; Sabina was looking forward to the spa at their hotel. She’s allowed to mourn for it.

“I’m fine,” she pouts.

Elena opens her mouth but Jane offers a timely distraction when she stops at the edge of the plateau to wait for them. “You coming?” she calls, “The cave isn’t that far, but it’s getting dark.” She points at the minute darkening of the clean blue overhead, then disappears behind the ridge. 

They follow.

The silence bounces differently on the slope, still high up enough that no tree is foolish enough to grow here. The quiet growls with the slow moving of the mountains, at an unstoppable pace no eye could catch. It’s eerie in between the strident cries of the prey having spotted their predator close to their burrows. It grows as cold as the shadows. 

But no words come to fill the spaces between the three hikers.

Jane glances over her shoulder more than she ought to, sharing looks with Elena who brings up the rear. After the earlier rebuttal, she has a hard time figuring out how to ask without sounding overbearing. 

Despite their worry, though, they can’t stop. The night brings challenges that even they are not ready to meet; there are places even brave children tend to bow to. 

Sabina isn’t oblivious per say. But she’s counting each of her steps to keep moving; when her feet hit the ground, her brain echoes the rhythm against her skull. The pain of it makes it tedious to stay focused, and impossible to spare any words for the jokes that would alleviate the girls’ worry. If her concentration falters, if she stops, she’ll never start again. 

So her mind moves sluggishly onward on a line too thin to allow much thinking space. 

She watches Jane gather dry wood as the near their chosen shelter for the night, notices how her heavy breaths whiten the air; she shivers as the cold invites itself between the cracks of her outfit to nestle in her achy joints. But she barely feels the bite of it on the exposed skin of her face. 

She dreams of the rooms Townsend had rented for them under aliases, where they should already be resting at now. Of Boz winking at them, telling them to enjoy the place after their mission. She dreams of the fact that two of them would have found their ways to the third’s room to spend the night together. She dreams of the warmth of reaching for them under the covers, in the middle of the night, and finding them without fail.

“Sabina…” Elena’s steps grow close when she comes to walk besides Sabina. “Did you hurt your arm?”

Sabina looks down to find her hand rubbing at her opposite forearm. She stops the mindless motion, frowns as she considers the question. Her arm itches, maybe. Burns a little, probably. It stings, for sure, but she can’t say how badly; being a spy fucks up the normal people scale of pain, she thinks. 

It messes up a lot, actually, but Sabina has always been fine with the unconventional life. She won’t ever try getting married again, but she has an apartment with a cupboard now, and in the cupboard she has her own mug between Jane’s and Elena’s. That’s enough for her. It  _ suits _ her. 

She stops, realizing something. “I lost count.” Her words are carried away, fog in the darkening air. Jane is barely more than a shape tirelessly leading the way now. And Sabina has failed in following. 

The crunch of Elena’s steps as she rounds Sabina to face her has the taste of the dawn before a class trip. “Your eyes,” Elena frowns in the falling night. She reaches a hand, slides it inside Sabina’s collar, her freezing fingers sending bitter blood to Sabina’s heart. She remembers to swallow, finds out it hurts. “God, you’re burning up.”

Jane backtracks when she realizes they’re not moving anymore. “What’s up? The cave is just around that bend,” she points behind her shoulder, but the pinch between her eyebrows tells more than her words do. 

Sabina tries to remember; they came this way a few days ago, slept one night already in said cave. But her memories don’t align with what she’s seeing now: a world of meandering colors and curves waving away. Sabina has never been seasick until now. 

“I don’t feel…” she doesn’t manage on the first try, so again, “I don’t feel good.”

“Sabina?” Jane calls, alarmed; but now the only answer she can give is to the inflexible gravity pulling at her arms, her head, her knees. “Sabina!” comes from farther away than she can reach. 

The dark soil under the rocks under her feet opens up to her. She lets herself be pulled into its embrace. It’s cold. It’s lonely. But it’s the only place she can go, right now.

A fire is going close to Sabina: she can hear the whisper of its sizzling in the heat scorching her skin. 

“You’re waking up.” 

Is she? The orange glow behind her eyes looks so much like the dream she was just having that she might have slipped into consciousness without realizing. She hates it there. It comes with the tightness of her clothes, the desert of her throat, the nausea, the morning after a night at the club. 

She opens eyes sticky with glitter– the ceiling is a rough grey cut by deep green moss. This isn’t home. This isn’t a hangover. 

Moving her head to look for the girls is the worst idea, but she can’t stop herself from reaching for them. The streak of clean white is a shock that attracts her eyes to the bandage around her arm. 

“It’s infected. Here,” a silver glass comes into view; Sabina follows the line of the hand holding it up its arm, all the way up to the familiar curve of a soft shoulder. Elena. The fire is dancing in her dark eyes, reflecting in her pulled back hair. She has the look of sleepovers at the hours where you’ve been awake so long you’ve passed the stage of sleepiness. It’s in the roughness of her voice, too.

Sabina lets her head be lifted enough to drink the warm water. It has a taste that Sabina identifies as medicine. Tasteless until it hits the back of her throat and she swallows. She gags; Elena shushes her. 

“Jane?” 

Elena hums, puts the glass down. “She went to the city to get help.” 

Sabina shifts until she sees the black veil swallowing the outside. “It’s dark,” she breathes out. She would go running into it herself if she fancied it, but the idea of Jane alone out there doesn’t sit well with her. Bravery rarely runs as far as loved ones taking risks themselves.

“She can handle it,” Elena answers, but her own eyes are on the entrance to the cave too. “You’re too sick to wait, anyway.”

Sabina understands what Elena means by that: security, practicality, logic. She can’t help hearing that this is all her fault. If she didn’t get injured, if she didn’t let it fester, if.

No matter that she genuinely barely felt when she got wounded, that it wasn’t top of the list when they found out they had to hike back to town, that she  _ forgot _ before the fever stole her thoughts away. “I’m sorry.” The tear running down her temple into her hair on the dark side of her is a line of acid on her fever sensitive skin. 

Elena wipes it away. “It’s okay, Nina. Sleep.” Her fingers petting her hair sends Sabina back into the part of childhood before she learned about death, before the absence of her grandmother highlighted the love her parents didn’t feel for her. 

“Tell me a story.” She would be embarrassed about the request if she was even sure she spoke it out loud. 

But then a soft hand takes away the tear that rolls down the lighted side of her before the heat dried it, and a gentle chuckle blows through her eyelashes. 

“Once upon a time…” Elena pauses, and Sabina can picture her looking at the ceiling for inspiration. “Jane is better at this than me…,” she sighs, humor in her voice. “Once upon a time,” she starts again, “a girl created a magic box, and she called it Calypso.”

There is one part of the fairy tales Sabina has always listened to no matter that she hasn’t always believed in it. 

She smiles as she drifts away. She’s warm. Elena is here. She knows that when she’ll wake up, Jane will be in touching distance too. 

There isn’t a morale that wild kids would care about, for they have gone through the darkness themselves. But the happy ending–

That is something Sabina has learned to expect, now.

And she’s too brave to fear it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [the thing where you can send asks and talk ;)](https://kinsbournescream.tumblr.com)
> 
> Comments and kudos? Thank you <3  
> And goodnight if you're going to sleep like me, and good morning if you're waking up to this :)


End file.
